Ten years after its market introduction, Landis+Gyr has announced plans to transition the advanced, solid-state feature set of the company's Altimus meter to alternate meter platforms within its product portfolio. The transition plan, which is expected to take at least two years to complete, will afford utility customers more AMR endpoint flexibility combined with advanced meter features at a more cost-effective price point.
In conjunction with the announcement of the transition plan, Landis+Gyr also apprised the market that the company is no longer accepting orders for its Altimus AXL (upgradeable and non-upgradeable) or Altimus AL (Socket-base) meter platforms. The full feature set of each meter is currently available within the company's FOCUS meter family.
According to Mimi Lynde, product marketing manager for the MX and Altimus meter families, "More and more, utilities need advanced features for residential and other single-phase metering applications, but they also want the added capability of working with any number of AMR system providers. Our new FOCUS meter provides ample room for additional communication boards and we already have a number of AMR system endpoints developed for the platform. With those considerations in mind, as well as the price points of both meters, merging the Altimus feature set into the FOCUS meter line just made sense."
Each advanced function of the entire Altimus feature set, including time-of-use (TOU), demand and load profile reads, service disconnect, and KYZ modem capabilities, will be fully transitioned to another Landis+Gyr meter platform prior to the discontinuation of Altimus meters with that capability. K-base capabilities are currently available on the FOCUS and S4e meters. Reactive metering is currently available in S4e configurations. Additionally, Landis+Gyr is adding the complete residential socket line (Form 1S through Form 4S) to the S4e meter platform, further offering more product options for those metering applications. All three platforms-Altimus, FOCUS and S4e-provide an expected life span of greater than 15 years.
The Altimus AL K-base configuration is the next family meter expected to be discontinued in about June of this year. Landis+Gyr has been working with its current customers to gain acceptance of the replacement FOCUS K-base meter within their utilities since its market introduction last year.
"We have not determined an exact cutoff date for order acceptance of the Altimus AL K-base meters," states Lynde. "Only when we have fully transitioned all of the functionality of it and other meter configurations, will we obsolete those meter. And, we will, of course, honor all blanket commitments accepted before manufacturing is terminated."
